Multi-party video conferencing systems exist which displays to each participant the video of the other participants in the conference. During the video conference, participants interact through speech and visual cues available through the video displays. Some video conferencing systems provide additional mechanisms for interaction, such as a text chat, presentation or document sharing, desktop sharing, etc. However, these video conferencing systems do not provide the capability for participants to know which other participants may contribute to a topic being discussed. For example, one of the participant's background and experience may be unknown to the other participants, and thus the other participants would be unaware that this participant can contribute to the topic being discussed. Although participants can manually inform others of their background and experience, this approach is impractical when the number of participants is large.